Siri and Spotlight answers are getting smarter

Do an experiment now: enable Crab and ask her any question, such as: “In what year was slavery abolished in Brazil?” At best, the assistant gives a direct voice response based on Wikipedia data. In most cases (like this one), however, she is unable to capture the data satisfactorily and simply displays the dreaded “See what I found” response by providing links on the internet for information checking.

This is frustrating, and one of the reasons Ma's assistant is considered inferior to her two rivals, Alexa and Google Assistant. But she is getting better.

Siri smarter answers

On Reddit, some Siri users noticed that, in questions in which she previously displayed the generic “See what I found” answer, the assistant went on to display factual answers, direct links that are not necessarily captured from Wikipedia, and may come from a number of other sources. The news, so far, is unique to English and US users, but should be expanded soon.

Apple has not officially announced any change for Siri, but the news is likely to involve extra doses of machine learning. Somehow, Ma must have developed a technology for the assistant to read and interpret information from pertinent popular pages in question, identifying a phrase in the middle that provides a satisfactory answer to the user.

The cool thing that these new, smarter answers extend to the Spotlight: You can enter the questions in the universal search system of Apple and get the same results only as without the voice, of course.

Not as if any of this was new: Google has been implementing similar technologies for years, so the Mountain View assistant's “intelligence” seems to be infinite over Siri. Still, one more step that Apple takes to get close to its main rivals and therefore, even late, valid.

via 9to5Mac